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Spoilt for choice, we created this monster

THIS week, for the best reason - none whatsoever - Jack, with whom I correspond regularly, sent me a picture of Lew Hoad. It was taken at Queens Club, London, in 1956 before he won the first of back-to-back Wimbledon titles. The timing was coincidental, but perfect.

Hoad is dressed immaculately in all white and wields a wooden racquet. The blond sun-bleached hair is natural and his muscular forearms are not inked with attention-seeking graffiti. There are no advertising hoardings in the background, only salubrious terraces. Such is the angelic innocence of the player, and the setting, the stripes on Hoad's socks seem an abominable imposition.

The picture - removed from an envelope, not downloaded from an email - was timely because it both begs and answers a question some will have asked since the release of a ''snapshot'' of the Australian Crime Commission report into corruption in Australian sport: so what?

Look at Hoad - striking a volley! - and you wonder if sport has moved so far from his relatively innocent days that the use of performanceenhancing drugs and match-fixing, and links with organised crime, are not merely to be expected, but assumed. Aren't we paying the inevitable price for our demand that sport be bigger, faster, stronger and - in a way capable of competing for the attention of a spoiled-for-choice public - more ''entertaining''.

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Like those who watch banal cooking contests, yet bemoan the lack of quality drama and first-rate documentary, perhaps our tastes even make us complicit. If we demand the product, what right do we have to be outraged about the consequences?

This is not to suggest, when you ponder the road sport has taken, that we should anticipate undiluted altruism; for the Marquess of Queensberry to referee Mundine fights, Baron de Coubertin in the judges box at the Olympics and King Solomon as the third umpire. At least not those with a realistic perspective of the past.

As Jack wrote on the back of the picture: ''Like Nuggett Miller, Lew wasn't disposed to concentrate ferociously every time he was doing his sporting thing.'' Under today's seering spotlight, an attitude like that could have you in the dock at spot-fixing trial.

A glance at Eliot Asinof's Eight Men Out - an account of the White Sox World Series match-fixing scandal of 1919 - dispels the notion corruption and cheating are contemporary phenomena. Thumb your way through Malcolm Knox's exploration of the colourful world of pre-World War I cricket Never A Gentleman's Game, and images of noble lilywhites are abolished.

In that context, it is both misguided and sentimental to yearn for supposedly more ''innocent times''. For those of us who revel in the constant carnival of modern sport, luxuriate in modern stadiums and thrill to unprecedented feats of athletic excellence, it is also disingenuous.

Hoad's image was from a time when sport was less exploitative and opportunistic. But also more exclusive (in some cases, racist, sexist and many other ''ists''), less accessible and far more class-conscious. But if you do not necessarily crave a return to the past, what we demand is an enduring connection with sport's best ideals. A sense that, beneath the advertising labels, the garish costumes and the quasi-mystical tattoos, today's sports stars are locked in a pure contest. That sport remains something in which the participants strive to find the very best in themselves and, as an extension, the very best in all of us.

Athlete. Basic equipment. Level playing field. Out you go. May the best competitor win.

Of course, the perversions apparently exposed by the ACC - and the trail of drug taking and other forms of cheating over the past four decades - suggest otherwise.

They lead us to conclude the race is now between the best scientists, rather than the best athletes. Facilitated, or wilfully ignored, by lax or self-interested administrators.

Apportioning blame is a matter of chickens and eggs. Are the clubs who have invited the dodgy scientists - and their underworld suppliers - into the sheds culpable because of their unbridled ambition? Were they taken for a ride by white-coated crooks who treated players like laboratory rodents?

Why didn't we expel the crime figures connected to clubs whose backgrounds were so well known, they might have carried violin cases?

By accepting the cash from the ubiquitous corporate bookmakers, have we facilitated the link between betting and sport? Or has this made us better equipped to monitor the cheats and match-fixers?

Enough unanswered questions to pose another: How long before that vital link between Hoad's era and the present is broken?